LeadSled,
Exactly!!!!
I was holding off on commenting, but, to my detriment, here I go....
This article is full of self pity over being in flying training debt and not making enough money to both cope with the cost of living and paying said debt off.
No employer, either good nor bad, forced any prospective employee into personal debt to get a job.
This is was my direct quote to 20 Malay CPL holders who just completed an MCC course and B744 Type Rating, in Prague and Frankfurt respectively, with funds borrowed from the Malay Government (akin to the Australian VEET FEE HELP Scheme).
Note: they already had training debt from full time CPL MECIR, not flown one hour since completed training (4 to 8 years) and that there are over 2,500 unemployed Malay basic CPL MECIR Pilots in Malaysia, and the numbers are growing. These 20 guys got the money by way of application, through a broker, who skimmed a cut, then said broker, offered an incentive to the ACMI airline, I was with at the time, to provide line training on the B744, as Second Officers, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it.
”Would you, or your parents, take $120,000 USD and place it into an investment vehicle without doing any due diligence on that investment vehicle, or the broker selling it.”
Their collective answer was a resounding NO..
”Why then, did you do it for Aviation?”
What newly minted Australian CPLs fail to understand is that they do have a GA sector to which they can get a job, however lowly paid and remotely located. For in the majority of the world, there is only sausgage factory schools and Airlines - nothing in between.
For interest, only four of the 20 remained with the airline until it went bankrupt (I was long gone by then). Of those four... three were sons of Captains in the airline and the fourth was a Chinese Malay, who just worked/studied hard.
You get a sense of disbelief and empathy for these young CPLs and their plight when, in the sim, being a support pilot for them, they failed their final rides. The breakdown into tears/sobbing as they beg for another chance and the realisation of just how much debt they are in.....
Also of note, the company was under now obligation to pay them anything IAW with their training/loan contracts. But after four weeks in location Jeddah, the company started to pay them per diem at least.
Moral of the story......don’t bitch about what you already have...